NYU Law - The Law School Magazinehttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine
The Law School MagazineTue, 14 Jul 2015 13:11:01 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Good Readshttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/good-reads/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/good-reads/#commentsMon, 15 Sep 2014 19:15:38 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=8170View a comprehensive list of faculty scholarship (PDF) published between January 2013 and June 2014.

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/good-reads/feed/0The Morrison Memohttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/the-morrison-memo-2014/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/the-morrison-memo-2014/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:38:23 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7644One of the many qualities that attracted me to NYU Law is the institution’s deep commitment to public interest, and the extraordinary quality, character, and diversity of the students who come here as a result. NYU Law takes a broad view of public interest that hinges on the belief that all of us in the legal profession are responsible for promoting justice—whether that means building careers in nonprofit organizations or the government, or doing pro bono work while in private practice. In choosing to apply their considerable skills toward promoting the public interest, our students and graduates render vital service to our country while also maintaining and extending an enduring value of our Law School.

In the pages of this magazine, we celebrate the pioneering work of Karen Freedman ’80, founder and executive director of Lawyers For Children, and Sherrilyn Ifill ’87, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and this year’s Convocation speaker. We also commend the accom­plishments of Sheila Birnbaum ’65, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and special master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund; Marshall Camp ’02, a partner at Irell & Manella and lead attorney in the first case to test changes to California’s criminal sentencing policies regard­ing juveniles; and Scott Fein LLM ’81, a partner at Whiteman Osterman & Hannah who was counsel for one of the longest-litigated civil rights cases in US history. Plus, we take great pride in the public interest work that our faculty and students do on a range of issues, including protecting free speech and challenging unlawful government surveillance through our new Technology Law and Policy Clinic, which is described in this issue’s story on intellectual property law.

In keeping with our expansive view of public interest, the Law School in recent years has forged a number of new connections to legal and policy work in gov­ernment. Last year, for example, we launched a new semester-long clinic in Washington, DC, that places students in a range of offices across the federal gov­ernment. And thanks to the generosity of Trustee Jay Furman ’71, we also instituted the Furman Pub­lic Policy Scholarship Program, which is designed to train and support outstanding students interested in pursuing careers in public policy.

At the same time, we are working to expand our connections at the state and local government levels. One way we’re doing this is through the New York State Excelsior Service Fellowship Program, which places graduates of select New York law schools in state agencies ranging from the Department of Envi­ronmental Conservation to the Department of Labor. Through these various programmatic initiatives, we will help new generations of NYU Law gradu­ates follow in the long tradition of alumni working at all levels of government, from Anthony Foxx ’96, US secretary of transportation, to Lisa Landau ’87, chief of the Health Care Bureau at the New York State Office of the Attorney General, to Kenneth Thompson ’92, the newly elected Kings County dis­trict attorney. Government is a creature of law, but its laws are only as good as the lawyers attending to them. I’m tremendously proud to have our tal­ented alumni helping to ensure that our government runs efficiently and fairly, safeguarding both our collective welfare and our individual rights.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first graduating class of the Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program, the bedrock of our strong public interest mission. The program covers the full cost of tuition for outstanding students who plan to dedicate their careers to public ser­vice. The RTK program also had an instrumental role in establishing the Public Interest Law Cen­ter, thereby inspiring the spirit of public inter­est that permeates our larger community. This important anniversary allows us to reflect on how RTK’s aims are shared by NYU Law as a whole. Collectively, we are dedicated to shaping the next generation of leaders, to fostering a dynamic com­munity of scholars, and to ensuring that a con­cern for the public interest is an integral part of our students’ conceptions of themselves and their roles, no matter which career paths they pursue.

The 2014 magazine was begun and finished dur­ing my first term as dean. The magazine staff and I are eager to learn what you think of our news and sto­ries and how we deliver them. Please take a moment to let us know by filling out the reader survey on the last page or online at bit.do/nyulaw2014survey.

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/the-morrison-memo-2014/feed/0Introducing Christopher Sprigmanhttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-christopher-sprigman/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-christopher-sprigman/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:32:08 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7526One afternoon last October when Christopher Sprigman heard that the provocative British graffiti artist Banksy was staging a street performance in nearby Union Square, he rushed out to join the crowds and snapped photos of a giant fiberglass Ronald McDonald having his oversize clown shoes shined by a street urchin.

For some, the moment was mere entertainment. For Sprigman, 48, the performance was “a brilliant piece of trademark appropriation art—great material for my teaching and inspiration for research.”

Moving from the University of Virginia School of Law to join NYU Law has invigorated Sprigman, an intellectual property law scholar with a focus on the intersection of IP and culture.

Writing for the popular Freakonomics blog, Sprigman has weighed in on Banksy as well as Cronuts, Trader Joe’s, and multiplex cinemas. He published a series of op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere on the NSA controversy and has written for other influential media outlets. “He’s always got his antennas up,” says colleague Jeanne Fromer. “He sniffs out an issue that people care about and connects it to something deeper that he is thinking about.”

Sprigman has carved out a niche in the area of “IP without IP,” or industries that survive in the absence of strong IP protection. “There’s lots of conversation about ‘IP without IP,’” says Professor Mark McKenna of Notre Dame Law School. “Chris is one of the first and most prominent voices in that mode of scholarship.” Conventional wisdom holds that copying kills creativity and that laws protecting against imitation are essential to innovation and economic success. Sprigman, along with his co-author and childhood friend Kal Raustiala, have challenged that notion in their book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation. Drawing on fashion, food, finance, comedy, and even football, which enjoy fewer IP rights than industries like music, movies, and pharmaceuticals, they show that innovation can thrive in a world of less, and less effective, IP protections.

Sprigman’s ideas and arguments are often bold and self-assured, traits that were apparent early in life. He was raised in Smithtown, on Long Island’s North Shore, by his parents Fred and Marilyn, both schoolteachers, with a large extended family. He spent his days by the water Huckleberry Finn style, “fishing, clamming, eating my lunch on the beach, and watching birds,” he recalls. “I was self-directed and interested in a lot of things, master of my own time.”

This willingness to dive into diverse interests is reflected in Sprigman’s winding path to academia. After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in history, magna cum laude, he worked at a publishing company, played guitar in various bands, traveled through East Asia, and toyed with the idea of pursuing journalism before entering the University of Chicago Law School.

He earned his JD with honors, then clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, worked as an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and clerked for Justice Lourens Ackermann of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg while teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law. Returning to the US in 1999, he worked as an appellate counsel in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division during the time that US v. Microsoft Corp. was going to trial. “It was absolutely fascinating,” he says. “We were deeply immersed in the facts that made law.”

Sprigman returned to law practice, making partner at King & Spalding at age 35. But not yet ready to settle down career-wise, he landed a fellowship in 2003 at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Sprigman set a goal of writing an article within four months that he could take on the job market, if his mentor and the center’s founder Lawrence Lessig deemed it satisfactory. The result was a paper that reintroduced the idea of formalities in copyright law. Its boldness won Lessig’s approval.

“The conventional wisdom in the world of IP scholars at the time was that this was a crazy, radical idea. It was a brave thing to do,” says Lessig, now at Harvard Law School, adding that Sprigman’s current work in “IP without IP” demonstrates the same ahead-of-the-curve “edginess.”

Since moving from Charlottesville, where he earned a reputation for caring equally about teaching, scholarship, and colleagues, Sprigman has been enjoying living once again near his extended family and parents, who are still in the house where he grew up. When not working, he cooks gourmet meals for friends; spends time with his children Iain, 14, and Arin, 12; and cycles. “Down in Virginia, I used to get a lot of thinking done on the bike. That’s more challenging in New York,” he says. “Maybe it’s time to start running again.”

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-christopher-sprigman/feed/0Introducing Sir Mervyn Kinghttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-sir-mervyn-king/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-sir-mervyn-king/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:31:08 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7523You’d think that after safely steering the British economy through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, Mervyn King would spend his first year of retirement taking things easy—tending his garden, luxuriating in his library, cheering on his favorite cricket and soccer teams. Instead, the former governor of the Bank of England is moving to New York to teach economics and law.

“It’s the intellectual excitement,” King explains. (A note about how to greet him: His title, given in 2013 in recognition of his distinguished public service, is Baron King of Lothbury, so he is formally addressed as Lord King. But he urges people to call him Mervyn.) “NYU is a unique law school because it brings together people of different disciplines to understand how different institutions operate. To understand many of the issues which affect the monetary system, it’s crucial to understand the legal framework in which banking has grown up. I have a lot of experience to reflect on some of those issues.”

Indeed he does. Born in 1948 to a railway worker and his wife, King studied at King’s College, Cambridge, and Harvard (as a Kennedy Scholar), then taught at Cambridge and Birmingham universities. He also served as visiting professor at both Harvard and MIT (where he had an adjoining office with future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke). After teaching at the London School of Economics, where he co-founded the Financial Markets Group in 1987, King was offered the opportunity in 1991 to put economic philosophies into practice as chief economist of the Bank of England. He was appointed governor 12 years later.

While he easily qualified as one of the smartest guys in the room, King “was never an academic prima donna,” Bernanke says. One reason, Bernanke hypothesizes, is that King moved out of academia and into policymaking relatively early in his career. “The world of policy, where you’re trying to deal with the complexities of what’s happening in the economy and the markets,” he explains, “is messier and, consequently, tends to induce more humility in its practitioners.”

King attributes his clarity amid the confusion of the crisis to the fact that he is a history buff. He notes that events that occurred more than 200 years ago still have relevance, such as Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a central bank that would assume individual states’ debts and talk in European financial circles recently about whether that could work in today’s eurozone. “My interest in history was a big antidote to thinking that mathematical models explain everything,” he says. “They’re very important, but they’re just tools of the trade.”

That’s only one of the lessons King looks forward to teaching would-be policymakers in his 12-session seminar, Money and Modern Capitalism: Law and Business. Yet even though he is aware that overreliance on mathematical models can lead to a myopic mindset, he notes that “it’s very helpful to have an intellectual framework in which to think about policy questions, and that framework is economics.” During the financial crisis, he points out, “people who were trained in economics and were doing economic policy had a clear intellectual framework that allowed them to think through the issues and come up with answers.” Those without a background in economics risked approaching each question as a one-off issue rather than seeing the bigger picture.

“I suspect he’ll be a very popular teacher, because he’s able to explain complicated ideas in an accessible and entertaining way,” Bernanke says.

“I’ve read a few of his speeches; they’re quite unusual for a central banker. They’re not dry and technical, like my speeches.”

Known for his wide range of interests, King frequently sprinkles his speeches and lectures with references to cricket, music, art, and his beloved Aston Villa soccer team. (When he was interviewed for the BBC’s popular Desert Island Discs program, one piece of music he chose to listen to if marooned on an island was a song cheering on Aston Villa to victory in the 1982 European Cup.) “Regardless of background or education, people can be touched by a painting or a piece of music or sport,” King explains. “All three can bring people together, and that is important.”

Since retiring from the Bank of England, King has picked up a new hobby: With his wife, Barbara Melander, King has been taking lessons in fox trot and swing dancing. Will he be tempted to compete on Dancing with the Stars? “No, no,” he demurs. Then, demonstrating his much-lauded analytic skills and judgment, he adds, “That would be far too risky.”

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-sir-mervyn-king/feed/0Temples & Traditionshttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/temples-and-traditions/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/temples-and-traditions/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:30:12 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7634The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing provided a colorful and dramatic backdrop for last October’s Weinfeld Gala, which recognizes donors who make significant annual contributions. The Law School presented Life Trustee Paul Berger ’57, a retired senior partner of Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC, with its Judge Edward Weinfeld Award. The award recognizes alumni of professional distinction who graduated from the Law School 50 years ago or more. Berger has represented a wide variety of foreign and domestic governments, corporations and other business entities, labor organizations, and tax-exempt organizations in a variety of corporate, legislative, and regulatory matters.

“When you get the balance between your belt weight and your buoyancy control device just right, you don’t tend to sink or to rise,” he says. “That’s an amazing feeling; you feel like you are flying.”

He has soared through academia as well. Catan, 34, earned a PhD in economics and a law degree from NYU, where he specialized in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance.

Catan is known for innovative scholarship backed by solid empirical research. In “The Irrelevance of Active Poison Pills,” which he presented at the 2014 American Law and Economics Association annual meeting, he examined how the adoption of a poison pill—a defense tactic against unwanted takeovers—affects corporations. Several studies have found that having a pill in place is negatively correlated with firm value, Catan says, and during the last decade institutional investors have pressured firms into dropping their active pills.

The commonly accepted theory was that adopting the pill was not in the shareholders’ interest, and that is why those firms would have lower value. Catan claims, however, that other factors may render any correlation meaningless. “It may be the case that firms adopt the poison pill because the directors perceive the shares as being mispriced,” he says, which would confound any attempt to infer how the presence of a pill affects firm value or operating performance. “This begs the question of whether the anti-pill crusade of the past decade was actually warranted.”

Catan is also writing “The Significance of State Anti-Takeover Statutes: A Law and Finance Perspective” with Marcel Kahan, George T. Lowy Professor of Law. “Catan is a very careful, sophisticated empirical scholar who has a detailed understanding of legal doctrine,” Kahan says. “His approach is to employ his knowledge of the law and of empirical methodology. Very few other scholars share this combination.”

Catan plans to teach Corporations this fall, and he’ll be co-convening the Law and Economics Colloquium with Jennifer Arlen ’86, Norma Z. Paige Professor of Law. At some point, he’d like to teach courses on mergers and acquisitions, and shareholder activism.

Earning his JD in 2003 from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Catan received the gold medal for achieving the highest GPA in his class.

The son of an engineer and a kinesiologist, Catan was born in Buenos Aires in 1980. He has younger twin brothers, one an accountant and the other an engineer, and is married to Cecilia Parlatore Siritto, who also received a PhD in economics from NYU. She was an assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has recently joined the faculty of NYU Stern.

As the couple prepared for their return to New York, Catan reflected on their good fortune: “I couldn’t ask for a better fit than NYU,” he says. “I’m honored to be a member of this faculty and feel especially lucky that others are interested in analyzing legal institutions from an economic perspective.”

Besides anticipating his new job, Catan is also looking forward to reuniting with another passion: the restaurants of New York. “I’m looking forward to a nice bowl of khao soi from Pok Pok in Brooklyn. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I love food,” he says with a laugh.

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-emiliano-marambio-catan-llm-10/feed/0Introducing Kwame Anthony Appiahhttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-kwame-anthony-appiah/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-kwame-anthony-appiah/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:29:46 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7519When Anthony Appiah talks about cosmopolitanism, he could be discussing his theory for living harmoniously in a diverse world, or recounting his life story.

He is the son of a prominent Ghanaian politician and upper-crust British mother whose biracial society wedding caused an international sensation and is thought to have inspired the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He spent his youth in two privileged but very different environments in Ghana and England, moving seamlessly between them.

Appiah now lives in Tribeca with his spouse, Henry Finder, editorial director of the New Yorker, in an apartment filled with art and artifacts that reflect his many interests and travels—from Ghanaian spoons once used to weigh gold to oils by painters of the British royal court. Hosting book parties with influential writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, Appiah is as conversant on the philosophy of language as he is on shearing sheep—and he can talk about those subjects in English, French, German, Latin, and Asante Twi.

“We live in worlds shaped by many identities—race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. I had many identities that helped cultivate my interest in managing the diversity around us,” says Appiah, a renowned philosopher who joined NYU Law this year with a dual appointment in the Department of Philosophy.

“He is the cosmopolitan citizen that he writes about,” says Amy Gutmann, Appiah’s co-author on Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1998) and University of Pennsylvania president.

“He knows and appreciates many different cultures, contributes to every community of which he is a part, and is absolutely comfortable wherever he is.” Appiah is charming and disarming, New Yorker editor David Remnick says: “I would not mistake the great elegance of his carriage, conversation, and bearing for a lack of really ferocious rigor in what he writes and thinks.”

Appiah first gained widespread prominence with the publication of his groundbreaking, partially autobiographical 1992 book In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. It analyzes the misconceptions that have clouded discussions of race, Africa, and nationalism since the 19th century and asserts that race is a social construct with no legitimate biological basis.

Appiah’s ideas about identity reached their greatest expression in his celebrated 2006 work, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. In it, Appiah sets forth a challenge: to be a global citizen with shared moral responsibilities to all of humanity, while also accepting and valuing differences in belief, color, and creed. “My slogan is: cosmopolitanism is universality plus difference.”

“I grew up in a place where people believe in witchcraft,” says Appiah. “Though I don’t, I can still be friends with people who disagree over that rather fundamental question of how the world works.” Appiah takes on his share of moral responsibility by advocating for human rights in his work with PEN American Center, where he was president, and with other organizations. In 2008 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year he joined the board of the New York Public Library.

Appiah’s father, Joseph Emmanuel, was an ambassador and occasional member of Parliament. His mother, Enid Margaret “Peggy,” was a writer who was active in the philanthropic and cultural life of Kumasi, Ghana. Joseph was related by marriage to two Ashanti kings, while Peggy could trace her blue-blooded lineage to the Norman Conquest. “My father and mother insisted that we be proud of both sides of the family,” says Appiah. “I never felt any difficulty about who we were, though other people often did.”

Growing up in Kumasi, Appiah recalls visiting his great uncle, King Prempeh II, who sat on a heavy chair and dressed in rich African togas. His family’s home, in a black upper-class neighborhood, held more books than the local library and was an obligatory stop for visiting dignitaries. When his father was abruptly jailed for sympathizing with the opposition, seven-year-old Anthony was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lady Cripps, in England. She was herself “a cosmopolitan thinker,” Appiah says, who had spent time in China distributing money for famine relief.

Appiah continued his education in England after his father was freed, attending exclusive private schools. As a teen, he was part of an intellectual left-leaning evangelical group that read the major 20th-century theologians and philosophers. He entered Clare College at the University of Cambridge intending to study medicine, but switched to philosophy. There he met Henry Louis Gates, who tried to recruit him to help build a black studies program in the US.

Appiah, however, earned his bachelor’s and doctorate in analytical philosophy from Cambridge and taught briefly in Ghana before joining Gates at Yale in 1981. Within the next decade, he would follow Gates to Cornell, Duke, and Harvard, where the two co-edited Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience and built up the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, which Gates now heads. “I’ve never met a person more comfortable in his own skin and in the complexity of all that that means,” says Gates about Appiah. “Anthony’s mind is too subtle to succumb to categorizations of being black or white, Ghanaian or English. He taught me that we are all the product of multiple identities.”

In 2002, Appiah left Harvard to become the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He was drawn to NYU in part to work once again with law students, as he did while a visiting professor in 1998. He will teach a course that explores how honor—the subject of his 2010 book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen—supports and competes with the law. Appiah plans to spend at least part of every year at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU’s other satellite locations, and to teach jointly with colleagues abroad.

Closer to home, he and Finder spend weekends in an 18th-century farmhouse near Princeton that they share with ducks, geese, and sheep. Appiah cherishes having a respite from the city and a place for their extended family to visit. Yet ever the cosmopolitan, he says: “If I had to choose between one or the other, I would choose the city.”

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/introducing-kwame-anthony-appiah/feed/0A Bittersweet Convocationhttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/bittersweet-convocation/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/bittersweet-convocation/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:29:12 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7702The seventh class of the Dual Master’s Program for Global Business Lawyers—a partnership between NYU School of Law and the National University of Singapore (NUS)—gathered at the Raffles Singapore hotel on March 3 to celebrate the program’s very last convocation. Professor Eng Chye Tan, deputy president for academic affairs and provost of NUS, addressed the final graduates, a close-knit class of 21 people from 15 countries.

Tan described the day’s ceremony as a “special yet bittersweet one,” marking both the end of an era and a chance for NYU and NUS to find new ways to work together.

Founded in 2007, NYU@NUS graduated 237 men and women during its first six years. This year, to toast the program’s accomplishments, all alumni were welcomed back. They flew in from all corners of the globe, with the largest turnout from the very first cohort, the Class of 2008.

Student speaker Eduardo Rosenberg Paiz LLM ’14 of Guatemala expressed how day-to-day life in Singapore had inspired him. The low crime rate contrasted sharply with that of his home country; it gave him peace-of-mind to attend class knowing his wife was safe. “The fact that this dream became a reality in less than a lifetime,” he said, “will feed my every instinct to leave whatever I encounter in a better way than how I found it.”

Mona Boughaba LLM ’14 of Switzerland, the other student speaker, was grateful for the close ties shared by the 2014 class—the “legacy year, as we liked to call ourselves.” While the previous months had included an array of challenges, ranging from routine stressors like demanding classes to disasters like the typhoon in the Philippines, the high points stood out. Among them, she said with a laugh: “After so many years, the surprise organized for Professor Alan Tan’s birthday was finally a real surprise for him!”

During the celebratory dinner, Alan Tan, director of NYU@NUS, and Simon Chesterman, founding director of NYU@NUS and now dean of the NUS Faculty of Law, cut a custom-made cake: two three-tier confections joined by a bridge adorned with both schools’ logos. It represented the partnership that had made those seven academic years so sweet.

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/bittersweet-convocation/feed/0Honoring Her Honorhttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/honoring-her-honor/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/honoring-her-honor/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:20:44 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7623When Chief Judge Diane Wood of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit was honored last February as the dedicatee of the latest volume of the Annual Survey of American Law, she received an extraordinary compliment from Oscar Chase, Russell D. Niles Professor of Law.

Wood is “the Learned Hand of our generation,” said Chase, referring to the Second Circuit’s chief judge from the 1920s to the early ’60s, whose brilliance and eloquence often propelled his name onto the Supreme Court shortlist. Appointed to the Seventh Circuit in 1995 by Bill Clinton, Wood was twice considered for the nation’s highest court by Barack Obama, an idea Chase heartily endorsed.

“Judge Wood is known for tactfully dealing with others in sometimes prickly circumstances,” said Dean Trevor Morrison, “not through grandstanding or combativeness, but by sheer intellectual force.”

That force, said Yael Tzipori ’14, editor-in-chief of the Annual Survey, shows law students that “it is possible to resolutely and articulately hold your position, even when you’re in the minority.”

Wood’s dissents often prevail in the end, notably in the 2008 matter of Bloch v. Frischolz, in which a Jewish family had affixed a mezuzah to their doorpost—only to have it repeatedly removed by a condominium association per building rules.

A three-member panel of the Seventh Circuit, including Wood, declined to hear Bloch. Wood’s dissent, based on the right to free expression, prompted the court to rehear the case en banc. Both her panel colleagues—Judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook—eventually reversed themselves, joining the full court’s unanimous decision.

Eleanor Fox ’61, Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Trade Regulation at NYU Law, is a 30-year friend of Wood and a fellow practitioner in antitrust law and international procedure. She said of Wood’s decisions: “They read like stories about people, which of course is what they are.”

]]>http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/honoring-her-honor/feed/0Honored for Their Servicehttp://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/honored-for-their-service/
http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2014/honored-for-their-service/#commentsTue, 02 Sep 2014 17:15:30 +0000http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=7528At its annual spring dinner in April to celebrate the accomplishments of alumni of color and support the next generation of public service leaders, the Black, Latino, Asian Pacific American Law Alumni Association honored Steven Hawkins ’88, executive director of Amnesty International USA, and Jenny Yang ’96, vice chair of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with Distinguished Alumni Achievement Awards.

Steven Hawkins ’88 (left) and Alina Das ’05

Hawkins has had a varied career in public interest law, from the NAACP LDF, where he successfully won the release of three black teens wrongly convicted in Tennessee, to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s successful campaign to end executions for juvenile crimes. He also advocated for social justice from the philanthropic side, directing Atlantic Philanthropies’ $60 million campaign targeting human rights and national security abuses.

Professor Alina Das ’05, in presenting his award, spoke of Hawkins’s inspiration for social justice stemming from meeting people when he was young who were incarcerated. “Steven Hawkins has had the audacity to act on behalf of those whom our society has chosen to lock up and throw away the key,” she said. “By bringing human rights home, he is breaking down the walls, not drawing lines between the deserving and undeserving, but recognizing the need to dismantle the racist and oppressive systems that infringe on all of our human rights.”

Jenny Yang ’96 (left) and Burt Neuborne

Yang was appointed by President Barack Obama to the EEOC and at the close of her first year named vice chair. Previously a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and a member of its Civil Rights and Employment practice group, she worked on cases such as Beck v. Boeing Company, in which she successfully represented 28,000-plus female employees alleging sex discrimination. She also served as a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties Burt Neuborne presented Yang’s award. Later, he said: “I thought she was a terrific student with a great future when she was a star in my Brennan Center seminar. I was right. During a distinguished career in private practice, and now as vice chair of the EEOC, Jenny has more than lived up to my very high hopes for her. She has become a formidable force for equality, decency, and respect in the law. And she’s only just begun.”